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Fuck Your High-Minded Design

Here’s an ill-considered piece by Mike Monteiro wherein he argues that designers, out of responsibility, should, in response to being asked to design things that matter, things that need design solutions, “raise our hands and say ‘I’m not making this.'” Full quote:

And if we come to the conclusion that these products cannot be made safe, how many of us will see it as our responsibility to raise our hands and say “I’m not making this.”

(If the damn thing doesn’t damage anyone except who it is fired at, it’s safe in the context of a weapon, but, whatever, he’s the design expert.)

He goes on to rant about firearm design, making Kalashnikov out to be some sort of money-minting weapons fetishist and how designers cannot design well if the intent of the object is to kill.

Fuck him. Fuck the AK-47. Fuck all guns and the people who design them, but especially fuck Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47.

Overall, it’s an adolescent’s petulant response to the real world, and, what pissed me off about it, is that it is one that does the design community a disservice.

Your role as a designer is to leave the world in a better state than you found it. You have a responsibility to design work that helps move humanity forward and helps us, as a species, to not only enjoy our time on Earth, but to evolve.

Great. But that’s not how the real world works. Yes, design can improve the world. But to do that, you have to engage with it, not hide behind your ideals.

Let’s refer back to Kalashnikov, who, again, didn’t die rich, and didn’t design the AK out of a fetish for instruments of war. His responsibility as an officer in the Russian army was to his world – wherein his soldier’s weapons did not keep pace with the enemies. War is not a world with which Monteiro is familiar, and one he dismisses as mass carnage, with gun violence being a recurring artifact, but war is a BIG and IMPORTANT part of the human experience. War gave rise to most of modernity’s key inventions, it’s leaders, and arguably the core of human societal improvement (reference Shield of Achilles or Ronfeld’ts TIMN).

History’s best designers have built on the back of war. Including Kalashnikov:

In 1941 a fellow soldier asked him: “Why do our soldiers have only one rifle between three men, while the Germans have automatics?”

“So I invented an automatic,” he said.

This begs the question, do you have a responsibility, as a member of a particular society, or organization, or whatever to improve the condition of your fellow tribe members? Is that not leaving the world, your “world, in a better state than you found it”? Did the survival of your peers and children not “move humanity forward”?

Monteiro again:

You have a responsibility to design work that helps move humanity forward and helps us, as a species, to not only enjoy our time on Earth, but to evolve.

Oh wait, he says “as a species,” which is apparently how, going against all of human recorded history, we should define ourselves. Which is exceedingly naive at best, or an alarming call to reduce your work, your design, to the lowest common denominator.

He wants you to conscientiously object to anything that’s complicated, in the sense that it may cause harm:

But how many of us are asked to design things that have the potential of causing harm to the people who come into contact with our work? How many of us will work on privacy settings for large social networks at some point? Will we think of how those settings affect those who interact with them? How many of us will design user interfaces for drop cams? Will we think of the privacy violations they might cause? How many of us will design products that put people in strangers’ cars? Will we consider those passengers’ safety as we design our solution? And will we see it as our responsibility to make sure these products are as safe as possible?

And if we come to the conclusion that these products cannot be made safe, how many of us will see it as our responsibility to raise our hands and say “I’m not making this.”

Because we have to.

Except, no, no you really, really do not.

Because, here’s the thing. Designers build things. And some, with courage, build them even though they’re complicated, trusting designers that follow them to improve upon the design, to make what is complex simple, to shake out what is necessary and what is not. But, and this is what pissed me off the most, if you listen to Monteiro, the cavalry will never come.

The approach of giving up, opting out, or, frankly, being a coward and not tackling the big problems – things like survival in war – reduces the field of design to pretty fucking pixels on a fucking screen.

You cannot do anything substantial, because people could die or harm may befall someone, never mind that it’s going to happen anyway, never mind that such is the nature of our Hobbesian existence.

Designers (broadly defined as engineers and tinkerers, given Monteiro’s scapegoating of Klashnikov) should not have been involved in the creation of oil infrastructure (global warming), or the saw (destroyed rainforests). Einstein wouldn’t have pushed the boundaries because nukes. ARPANet wouldn’t have happened (an exercise in daisy-chaining nukes.)